Given some of the films which have showcased Eastern European locations for American audiences in recent years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in every disused industrial building in this part of the world, there’s some sort of dodgy sex-and-torment club holding sway. Such is the case in Dark Crimes (2016), which crams quite a lot of breasts and torture into its opening scenes; this scene actually takes place outside of the timeframe of the rest of the film and as such is a little confusing, but quite possibly it seemed a shame not to add it in. These considerations aside, Dark Crimes is probably most noteworthy for its casting of Jim Carrey in the lead role – though it’s languished a while, two years in fact, waiting for a release, which seems surprising given his bankability. Well, having now watched the film in its entirety, let’s just say I’m rather less surprised that it’s been left sitting on a shelf somewhere.
The plot, then: Carrey plays Detective Tadek, a Krakow cop whose card has been marked by some (at first) unspecified misdemeanour in the role. he has a year left until he retires, so when he has his interest in a cold case rekindled, he hopes that successfully solving it will grant him his reputation back. It all seems too good to be true: a local crime novelist, Kozlow, in describing a murder which took place in a now closed sex club called The Cage (from the opening scenes), seems to know a suspicious amount about how the victim’s body was found. Kozlow gets picked up and Tadek is utterly certain he’s got his man, but events conspire to make it all seem a lot less clear cut than that.
The film’s bleak, austere and colourless appearance puts me in mind of some of the best of the ‘Scandi-Noir’ TV series of the last ten years – The Bridge, The Killing and so on. An Eastern European rendition of this kind of thing has real potential. The resemblance is really only aesthetic, though, as whilst these series are masters at engineering plot twists, there’s really only one plot twist in Dark Crimes, which you will no doubt see a mile away. In essence, there’s very little plot to go around here, and although it has the modest running time of ninety minutes, very little happens to fill that time. The film’s stand-out feature is that it’s a series of contradictions. For instance, it’s all delivered in an oddly staccato way, with lots of edits and cuts to different locations and scenes, though for all that, Dark Crimes feels very slow and ponderous throughout. Another contradiction comes with the dialogue; this is a very dialogue-averse film, with minimal exchanges between characters – but then, where it tries to be provocative, it drops a long list of I’m sure completely unintentional clangers, especially where the cartoonish villain Kozlow is concerned. His language is meant to be coarse and uncompromising; in effect, it comes out like someone using swearwords for the very first time.
As for Carrey, I suppose you could say this is a change of pace for him – but then again, he’s already proven he can do serious acting elsewhere. Once the initial mild surprise of seeing him looking so dour wears off, you realise he’s being given very little to do here; that dour stare is the whole role. He also veers between a neutral accent (better) and an attempt at an Eastern European one (worse), which just makes it doubly silly. (It’s never really explained why the whole of Poland is conducting its affairs exclusively in English, right down to the TV news. Only the names are Polish in this version of Poland.) Charlotte Gainsbourg has a role here, too, one which grows in importance as the film moves forward, but she essentially reprises the role she’s done several times elsewhere, with a completely unsurprising nude scene/sex scene and a strung-out demeanour overall. To be fair, she isn’t permitted any characterisation for most of the film, so it’s all too little, too late when it finally comes along.
I can’t speak to the quality of the 2008 article which was the inspiration for the film, but I can say that Dark Crimes is almost bewilderingly bad, and an unfortunate, unexpected black mark against the names of the actors involved, all of whom I hope have sacked their agents since then. If director Alexandros Avranas somehow hoped that an unadorned filming style and a few former Eastern bloc locations would provide enough atmosphere to blind us to the scanty plot and flat performances, well – he’d be wrong on that front. This film is simply deadly, deadly dull.
Dark Crimes will be released on the 9th July 2018 by Signature Entertainment.